Taxevity

Here is how Taxevity was built. Some ideas may help you, your family or your business.

Branding

Average or lousy branding prevails in small business. To prevent that risk, Taxevity turned to professionals who deliver the quality and creativity that big business demands. Here's the Marketing Support team.

Equipment

When you get the proper tools and learn how to use them, your clients get better results.

Systems

A well-run organization uses systems to ensure consistent service and quality. Yes, mistakes happen, but systems — especially when automated — reduce the risk.

Contact Management

Managing your contacts is essential but finding the ideal tool is different. Since using a tool takes discipline, you want a tool you like using. Microsoft Outlook has basics to get you started. Going beyond, you have the option of applications that run on your computer or online. With online, you get continual updates and the comfort of knowing your data is backed up (though doing your own backups is always wise).

The following products were used (not merely evaluated but used)

• Prophet CRM plugin for Outlook: tied to desktop; not accessible remotely through corporate Citrix setup
• FreeCRM Pro: web-based but too cumbersome to use (felt like work); sending emails was a chore; issues syncing contacts with Outlook

After extensive analysis, Taxevity is switching to Batchbook, effective February 19, 2010. BatchBook runs online, feels friendly and gives great value. You can add To Do items by sending an email to your Batchbook. To associate an email with a client, send your message your normal way with a BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) to your BatchBook. Clients get added automatically.

• 3 reasons why we picked BatchBook as our CRM tool (Zebu blog)
• BatchBook is Great for Contact Management (Chris Brogan)

Batchbook gives you a 30 day free trial (with a credit card). Search online for "batchbook promo code", and you might be able to double the evaluation period. You can also use the well equipped free version for up to 200 clients indefinitely.

Backups

To eliminate the risk of losing client data, store it in different ways and keep copies in different places

• LAN archive: to a shared hard drive onsite
• portable hard drives: for storage offsite (which never seems to happen)
• DropBox
  • automatically synchronizes key files among computers and save incremental backups (2 GB free storage)
  • read the magic of Dropbox for sync and sharing (Marketing Actuary blog)
• JungleDisk: incremental backups online